Love Like Hate (22 page)

“My husband drinks all day, Biggie Sen. That’s all he does. That’s why he can’t hold a job for more than a week.”

“How’s he in bed?”

“Not half as good as you, Biggie Sen. He’s not interested, at least not in me. He gives the money I make to other girls. You’re so nice, Biggie Sen. You’re really the nicest man who comes in here. I’ve
never seen you drunk, for example. The drunk ones are so grabby. They squeeze your tits like they’re made of rubber.”

Sen had been waiting for this opportunity to debauch for a long time. But before Kim Lan stopped having sex with him, he had no reason. Playing chess all the time can give one an overgrown head, like the elephant man’s, and atrophy the rest of one’s body. Sex with Kim Lan, or with anyone else for that matter, was a necessary antidote to chess. Without sex, Sen’s penis would have become the tiniest adjunct, an imperceptible mole on his colossal head. Grown complacent with the same-old-same-old with Kim Lan, he needed to have his frayed mind recharged with virgin vistas.
Every human body is touchingly beautiful and soothing to the eye
, he reflected, from
the most malnourished to the most voluptuous, from the most underdeveloped to the most worn-out
. Appreciating the naked human form on an aesthetic level, he considered himself an artist, or at least an anthropologist. He could see through clothes now. All of Saigon became a riot of smooth, jiggling flesh in his feverish mind. Waking, sleeping, his mind was always erect. Wandering around the neighborhood, he undressed everyone: the squatting soup vendors ladling hot broth into bowls; the seamstresses behind sewing machines, their ankles moving rhythmically; and all the students coming home from school, preteens, teenagers, shoving each other and laughing. He found them all equally beautiful.

He loved to have a prostitute on all fours, on her hands and knees, her head down, her hair cascading, hiding her face, her breasts hanging down. Before humping her, he would stand to the side to admire her beautiful form.

After Sen had sampled all the prostitutes in the neighborhood, he wandered farther afield. He even went to Tran Xuan Soan Street to try sex on water. The girls there posed as vendors of
hot vit lon—
a delicacy of duck embryo eaten directly out of an egg. For less than three bucks (including fifteen cents for a condom), Sen got to hop on a sampan, take a brief cruise, then rock the boat beneath one of
those houses on stilts bordering the river. On board there was a reed mat, beer in a cooler, and a bucket of water for sanitation purposes.

Sen heard that in the fun-loving coastal city of Vung Tau, you could even try sex in the water. During the day, a girlfriend could be rented by the hour on the beach, inner tube included. This was a rather lame arrangement, Sen figured, since you had to share the water with kids, old people and Jet Skis, a situation which made consummation a little awkward. At night, the whores came out for real on Pineapple Beach, a rocky stretch not far from the main post office. These ladies were known as “fairies,” celestial beings who would skinny-dip with your mortal self in the South China Sea for a mere thirty-five bucks. The only prostitutes Sen declined were the rare Chinese ones. It’d be like screwing your sister or your first wife or something. He didn’t care for it.

Even after Sen had tried a hundred girls, he still had a special place in his heart for Kim Lan because she was the only Vietnamese woman ever to say yes to him without expecting to be paid immediately. Also, by accepting him as her husband, she granted him real citizenship of the country.

As Sen degenerated into debauchery, Kim Lan had plenty of time to brood over the institution of marriage. Late one evening, sipping an iced beer, a brand-new habit, she mused how every marriage has its poisoned moments and unfixable permanent defects.
Since people are flawed, a marriage must be flawed. Though it beats living alone, a marriage is always a misunderstanding between two dishonest people with selfish intentions
, she thought, shuddering, sipping her beer.
That’s why most of them end in divorce, murder suicide, or a suicide pact. Marriage is simply a justification for murder
, she concluded.
A good marriage, relatively speaking, is one that ends prematurely in a fatal traffic accident. All in all, I consider myself very lucky
. Her own imperfect marriages she blamed on history. If history can kill and maim, then of course it can yield flawed husbands. A second here, an inch there, and each of us can be dead a hundred times over, so being badly married isn’t the worst
thing. Having reached middle age, she also realized that in any maledominated society, women are forced to marry down, not to their social inferiors, but to their inferiors period. She shuddered thinking about whom Hoa might marry in the future.

Meditating on marriage, Kim Lan liked to comb the newspapers for stories of domestic violence. Feeling comforted and edified by accounts of marital disaster, she reveled in the all-too-rare incidents of wives killing husbands. She often wondered why some women retaliated against their husbands’ infidelity by splashing acid on the other woman’s face. At the market, she occasionally saw Cam Nhung, a famous singer from the sixties whose face had been destroyed by a jealous wife. Reduced to begging, she wore an old, plastic-wrapped photo of herself around her neck to convince passersby of her identity. Her unrivaled, still-beautiful hands also served as proof. Though Kim Lan always gave Cam Nhung money, she never stood around to hear the poor woman sing.

There was another acid victim in Kim Lan’s neighborhood. Kim Lan saw it happen. Mr. Quang was the richest man in the neighborhood. He had started a car rental business with money sent to him by relatives in California. It grew to three cars and four vans. His four sons worked for him as drivers. The oldest had a beautiful wife, Huong, and a daughter. Feeling fortunate to marry into such a prosperous family, Huong watched Mr. Quang’s declining health with hope and anticipation. Mr. Quang’s wife had died many years before. At seventy-six, as he was cruising steadily toward Hades, as the cypresses and stone angels came clearly into view, he decided to take a lover, a forty-two-year-old woman named Thuy. Everyone was scandalized, but Huong was furious. Failing to persuade her father-in-law to quit his shameful behavior, Huong started to threaten Thuy over the phone. “Whore, you better lay off my father-in-law, else I’ll peel the skin off your bleeding cunt!” Thuy refused to be intimidated because she also saw cars and vans in her future. That’s when Huong decided to get tough. She secretly followed Mr.
Quang to Thuy’s apartment, noted the address, then hired a female goon to send her rival a message. The very next day, the goon scraped against Thuy’s motorcycle in traffic, sending her sprawling to the asphalt. As she struggled to get up, bleeding, the goon slapped her across the face, screaming, “Are you blind?!”

That will teach her
, Huong thought, thinking she had solved the problem once and for all. A month later, however, as she was squatting at the market to pick out some fish, someone called her from behind. Turning around, she could only catch a brief glimpse of Thuy’s face, crazed and angry, before she found herself flopping on the ground, her clothes torn from her burning flesh. They had to splash ice water on her as she screamed and screamed. Her face melted like wax. Globs of flesh streaked down her face, her nose collapsed, her right eye dissolved. If she had opened her mouth at the crucial moment, her tongue would have been gone.

When Mr. Quang died soon after, Huong’s husband inherited the family business. They had become rich, as planned. Treatments for Huong were so expensive, however, that all the cars and vans were gone after a couple of years. Her husband never abandoned her. Since she could not leave the house, he bought songbirds to keep her company. The day she came home from the hospital, as she walked through the door, her two-year-old daughter screamed, “That’s not my mom! That’s a monster!”

1
ENLIGHTENMENT

H
oa was doing well at the New York School. She struggled with the past, present and future tenses, using them interchangeably, but her vocabulary was growing rapidly. Her teacher was a gutter punk from Staten Island named Sky. In Vietnam for three years, he had no plans to return to New York. He had gone to Vietnam to explore Buddhism, only to discover that there was no Buddhism in Vietnam. Sky had read in all the guidebooks that 80 percent of Vietnamese were Buddhists, but Vietnamese Buddhists, he soon found out, only went to the temples to pray for a winning lottery ticket. Most monks were entrepreneurs who drank beer with their mistresses in the evening. The monks and priests who tried to perform their primary function, speaking their conscience, had been sent to jail.

There is no religious instruction in Vietnamese Buddhist temples. Most Vietnamese have never heard a sermon in their lives. The religious figurines displayed inside their homes are mostly Taoist, the Gods of the Kitchen, of War and of Wealth. There may not be a Buddha. There is also the all-important altar dedicated to one’s ancestors. If a Vietnamese Buddhist owns religious texts, they are most likely pamphlets of the popular kind, sanctioned by no Buddhist organizations. In the Vietnamese universe, Buddhism is merely a thin blanket half hiding an animist demon.

Perhaps no Buddhist doctrine is more abused by the Vietnamese mind than reincarnation. Sky had bought a fifty-two-page pamphlet
titled
Karma Through Three Lives
, written by someone called Thich Thien Tam (literally the Zen Heart Monk). The cover featured a drawing of a man being sawed in half by two demons. With the help of a dictionary, Sky tried to wrest an epiphany or two from this enigmatic volume.

The pamphlet had three sections. The first answered all your questions about karma and reincarnation. The second recounted “true stories” of reincarnated lives. The last rehashed the first two sections, but in ballpoint pen illustrations.

Question #2 asked: “Why am I riding on a horse, not sitting in a carriage?”

Answer: “Because you paved roads and built bridges in your previous life.”

Question #12: “Why do I have both my parents?”

Answer: “Because you respected lonely people in your previous life.”

Question #13: “Why am I missing a parent?”

Answer: “Because you trapped birds in your previous life.”

Question #24: “Why do I have a harelip?”

Answer: “Because you blew out the altar lamp in your previous life.”

Question #26: “Why am I a hunchback?”

Answer: “Because you laughed at ardent worshippers in your previous life.”

Question #28: “Why are my legs shrunken?”

Answer: “Because you were a highway bandit in your previous life.”

Question #35: “Why was I poisoned?”

Answer: “Because you killed too many fish in your previous life.”

Question #41: “Why does my body stink?”

Answer: “Because you sold fake incense in your previous life.”

Section Two began rather testily with “Who said that karma is nonsense? A man and a goat can switch places before you know it.”

It had nine stories of reincarnation. Below is Sky’s translation into English of the first one:

Hau Nhi, of Kim Don, was disrespectful toward his parents. When he saw his mother give rice to the poor, he became angry, hit her, and kicked her out of the house. His wife and children tried to intervene, but he would not listen. Soon after, his body erupted into boils. He suffered terribly and died soon after
.

After he died, Hau Nhi appeared to his son in a dream and said, “Because I was disobedient and impious, I’ve been turned into a pig. I belong to Mr. Truong Nhi, who lives by the Tuyen Vo Gate in Kinh Su. You must go there to ransom me right away, else it will be too late.”

Waking up, his son followed Hau Nhi’s instructions and arrived at Truong Nhi’s house. True enough, there was a sow that had just given birth to a litter of pigs. Among the piglets, there was one with a human face, with whiskers resembling his father’s. The son tearfully explained his reasons for wanting to buy the pig, and offered ten bars of gold for it. Truong Nhi would not agree to a deal, however, and promptly killed the pig
.

This happened in the thirty-ninth year of the Sung Dynasty [996
AD
]
.

2
ERSATZ IZODS